You always learn something new at the Cucalorus Film Festival. Case in point: "Casting By …", a surprisingly meaty documentary screening Friday and Sunday at Thalian Hall.Directed by longtime indie filmmaker and film editor Tom Donahue, "Casting By …" looks at the profession of the casting director – the middle man (or, more accurately, middle person) who screens actors for roles in films and TV. The final choice, of course, is up to the director and producers, but the casting director's input can be crucial. Martin Scorsese, who should know, says on camera that casting is 90 percent of film making. Donahue focuses on the work of the late Marion Dougherty (1923-2011), who helped remake the casting business in the 1960s and '70s. Many of today's top casting directors – Ellen Lewis ("Forrest Gump," "The Departed," "Mama Mia!"), Juliet Taylor ("Annie Hall," "Schindler's List") and Wallis Nicita ("The Witches of Eastwick," "The Fabulous Baker Boys") to name just a few – apprenticed under Dougherty's guidance.In the days of the studio system, up until the 1950s, movie studios largely did their own casting with their own repertory company of actors (which they occasionally swapped around, like a fantasy football league). This was the golden age of type casting. If you did a certain type of role well once or twice, you'd wind up doing it the rest of your career. Thus, Gale Sondergaard wound up playing femmes fatales with foreign accents, Randolph Scott usually played cowboys and Edward Everett Horton played a string of sissy sidekicks.When the studio system began to break down, that's when independents like Dougherty began to have an impact. A failed actress, Dougherty got her start in New York TV, helping people like Jack Lemmon, Jean Stapleton, Robert Duvall and Ed Asner get their big breaks on "Kraft Television Theater."She didn't exactly discover James Dean, but she got him his first TV jobs.Instead of typecasting, Dougherty tried to match roles to an actor's range, based on extensive notes (which, in the early days, she kept on drawers and drawers of index cards).For example, because Charles Webb's novel "The Graduate" describes Benjamin Braddock as an upper-crust, Ivy League, vaguely WASP-ish type, Embassy Pictures thought Robert Redford would be perfect for the part. Instead, Dougherty advised Mike Nichols to try a New York stage actor she admired by the name of Dustin Hoffman.By the 1970s, as "Casting By …" chronicles, casting directors were getting their own "cards" – i.e., their names appeared by themselves (not with a whole bunch of other people) in the movie's opening credits.One key honor eluded them, though. Casting directors remain virtually the only craft field in the film industry that doesn't have its own Oscar at the Academy Awards. (Casting directors in television have been getting their own Emmy for years.)The big roadblock, according to the documentary, is the Directors's Guild of America. Directors, it seems, don't like other film folks being called "directors." Because, well, THEY'RE the directors, the Big Cheeses. (In "Casting By …" Taylor Hackford of "An Officer and a Gentlman" fame, gets to make the argument as the current DGA president.)This all goes back to the theory of the "auteur," promoted by the French and picked up by a lot of American critics such as Andrew Sarris, who see the director as the "author" of the film. An Alfred Hitchcock picture looks very different from a John Ford picture or a Martin Scorsese picture.Cinematographers, or head cameramen, however, are referred to as "directors of photography." The directors aren't too happy about that, but they live with it.So great is the opposition, though, that the Motion Picture Academy even refused to grant Dougherty a special Oscar in honor of 40 years of achievement, despite appeals from the likes of Clint Eastwood.Meanwhile, as Donahue notes, the role of the casting director may be declining in Hollywood. As more mainstream pictures become heavy on digital effects and lighter on dialogue (making them easier to sell in overseas markets), choosing actors isn't as crucial.

Ben Steelman: 343-2208Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com

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